Enter Shadowpact
Creative Staff:
Story: Tom Taylor
Art: Trevor Hairsine, Gigi Baldassin
Colors: Rain Beredo
Letterer: Said Temofonte
What They Say:
The Justice League is trapped on Earth, and they’ve discovered that life still survives on this dead planet! Survival is precarious, though-and with billions of infected still roaming the surface, death lies around every corner. But it isn’t just the anti-living our heroes have to worry about, because John Constantine, Swamp Thing, and Zatanna are about to discover another evil growing…
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers):
Returning to this property having missed out on it during the early days of the pandemic has been fun as it reminded me once again just how good Tom Taylor is with these characters. I’ve long enjoyed Taylor’s writing going back to huge chunks of the Injustice property and this series, in particular, allows his talents to really shine as it’s not beholden to a sprawling continuity. This series has Trevor Hairsine handling the pencils on it with a great team behind him inking and coloring it so that it shows a real richness in design and layouts and captures both the power of the events and the humanity of it as well, whether dealing with Ollie or the last couple of pages and spreads there.
With the tease of a cure in the last issue, that becomes part of the story in the back half of this installment. That has the Justice League arriving at the Garden that Poison Ivy has created, which through its shifting roots has kept people safe there for five years, though not without a toll. The arrive of the remains of the ship and its heroes isn’t met completely well as Ivy won’t let Black Canary bring in Green Arrow as he’s been lost to the equation, and that has her heading off to be alone with him which is understandable but disturbing. There’s a lot of good stuff here in characters reconnecting, such as Damian making sure Jason is okay with him taking on his father’s role, and seeing Cassie and Damian getting some time alone as well after she’s lost Diana a second time in this way. It’s good to show the growth, to see how the Garden has operated, and that there’s now a sense of hope with a cure within Vic Stone’s body.
Where the book expands on things is with a sequence at the start that has Arsenal protecting some people in Chicago where they’ve found some safety as the unliving have started to attach. The Shadowpact crew led by Constantine shows up to deal with it and we get our intro to them through it. It’s fun and I have such a love of the Shadowpact comic series from a decade ago that seeing them again delights me. But it takes a wonderfully dark turn when Swamp Thing arrives, considerably angry, and tells Constantine he needs to go to Australia to rescue some people from a walled garden there before he goes in and eliminates the corrupted garden. That splits the ‘pact for a bit and what we see in Australia allows for more death and to see more of how other heroes and villains have been twisted by the equation, setting up for some real evil ahead to surface. Just what Plastic Man has become here is unnerving.
In Summary:
DCeased continues to be a grim delight as we see moments of hope and love here of different kinds but we also see some real evil at play. Or, at the least, some really primal nature kind of thing depending on how you want to view those that have been turned by the Anti-Life Equation. I wish we had just a bit more with Black Canary to see how she’s coping with things, and more of what Superman is going through, but I’m more than happy to give over more time to seeing this incarnation of Shadowpact and watching them do their thing. At least until several of them are killed because that’s what this book does on a regular basis. Taylor and Hairsine have a great book here once again that I can’t wait to get a chance to dig into more of.
Grade: B+
Age Rating: 13+
Released By: DC Comics
Release Date: August 4th, 2020
MSRP: $3.99
